Dr. Ross Mitchell, Division of General Internal Medicine, uses AI to harness health data
22 June 2023
By Adrianna MacPherson, in Folio
As an expert in developing artificial intelligence tools to improve health care, Dr. Ross Mitchell has always viewed the research process a little differently.
For a long time, he explains, the standard approach involved starting with a hypothesis, conducting experiments to collect data and then determining whether the data confirmed or denied that hypothesis.
Instead, Mitchell was approaching issues from a data-first perspective — much like the way the physicians he worked with approached the problems they saw.
“It’s what happens every day in hospitals around the world. When somebody comes in with symptoms, you don’t know what it is, so you do tests and imaging to look for things. You literally start by looking at the data and then form a hypothesis,” says Mitchell, a professor in the Department of Medicine, adjunct professor in the Department of Computing Science and one of two University of Alberta researchers recently named Canada CIFAR AI Chairs.